You can do it, but should you? Where do you draw the line? What would a generally nice guy do? (I'm just asking)
We all interpenetrate the answer to these questions on our own terms, but I believe that the predictability of power gamers is what ultimately proves my point. The typical reply is "well everyone else can do it if they wanted to", but then there would only be one army at the GT and still only one winner. What fun is that?
Animatone
Actually, at our last GT, we only had 2 Ogre players out of 36. That's pretty good! We don't have too much of a problem with cookie cutter internet lists, but we do have powerful armies. The guy who won played an All Slaaneesh Leadership Bomb army. It was tough, but not the standard internet build. A lot of the armies there are pretty tough.
I don't think it's a problem trying to play with a list that can actually win games. It's not like I'm going to turn into a jackass all of a sudden. There are a lot of great guys who play at the top tables all the time. They get good sports scores. I don't think a Chaos Dwarf army with no war machines is your standard internet build, either. You don't see a lot of Chaos Dwarfs around here and I think it would be a good change to bring them.
I want to try to compete at higher tables to have a good time. I'm tired of playing at the middle or lower tables and crumbling whenever I face a tough army. I want an army that can dish as good as it can take. I want to challenge myself at a higher game. I don't think that's bad.
I think my biggest pet hate in this field is the army jumper, I have less issue with the guys who are dedicated long term players of a certain army even if they use cookie cutter lists as the chances are, if they are veterans of that army, they would have come up with those conclusions/combinations on their own. However the people that jump to whatever the current percieved “best” list is and run cheese lists lifted from the internet are the guys I really loathe.
I do wholeheartedly support fluffy lists though and always take models over looks/fluff rather than effectiveness on the table top. I even think about fluffiness when choosing gear for my characters and always give units FC regardless of whether its cost effective or not. Prime example is my Blood Angels heresy project, I am theming my army around the Siege of Terra so therefore have no units/vehicles that werent present at that time regardless of how effective they are, so no death company or librarian dreadnaughts etc. I think it makes my army more fun to play as I could be using some particularly nasty lists with the BA book.
everybody plays to win, because nobody plays to lose (.... rare cases).
For me a well fought game is all I want and that's all I aim for.
Abecedar
So is a well fought game the goal or winning? I can totally agree with enjoying the quality of a game, but quality doesn't have to do with victory like you said.
And actually a lot of people who compete in most events and enjoy them are losers and never have any illusions of winning even from the start. Look at the marathon runners. How many actually win, one person. Yet how many compete, millions. Still they all enjoy it and get out there every day and do it.
So I'd have to say the vast majority of people who compete in just about anything do it because they genuinely have fun with it and enjoy competition not winning, because the fact of most competition is that you ultimately are a loser in the grand sense, but what you have won/earned is the product of your efforts, regardless of the result.
There's a good reason why sports teams are organised into leagues depending on how good they are.
If you use the game as an excuse to socialise, then fine, but if you want to make the game itself more enjoyable then an even match is the way to do it.
cornixt
That was similar to my point about salary caps. All teams know that all they have to do is offer up enough money and the best players will all play for their team. The problem is only some franchises have the money in order to do so. So how enjoyable would sporting events be if one team was without question far superior to the other teams due to their roster of players? It wouldn't be fun at all, it would be boring and predictable. Hence salary caps, so the talent pool is distributed evenly to the best of the leagues abilities.
Contrast that to Warhammer what do we have?
The cyclical nature of army rosters being invariably being stacked from one edition to the next with the motive of selling product. Why buy the newest army?... Because it's typically the nastiest, with the newest and latest troops/rules, far better to smash your opponent with given the right composition. So how do we police ourselves if the commissioner of the league (GW) doesn't care about a salary cap (balanced lists), because as soon as one team has all the star players, they just make up better ones and given them to some other team so they can sell more tickets?
The whole "is a army book balanced" debate is a whole other topic, but the resounding point still stands true. Look at competitive tournament lists and ask yourself do they look very different or are they surprisingly similar? I believe this "win first, fun second" mantra is for one counter productive to notion of enjoyment since not everyone want's to field the same army in order to play to win at Warhammer, and secondly it actually moves less product for GW. Why not endorse tournaments that encourage, and I mean seriously encourage more varied army lists based on specific tournament objectives that change drastically and require people to come to the table with different army lists (lets say no lord choices and 50% core composition)? People would bitch I'm sure, but what can you do? If you want to win the local GT and you can't take a lord, well good luck and it's only then that we'll see some truly interesting forces across the board and more value in game play and generalship as opposed to what magic items happen to be in your book and what special troops you might have access to.
Towards the end of my gaming days I seriously would only play in local tournaments that really made and effort to inject some life in tournament play and get people thinking outside the W box for a change. Then not only is Warhammer a more enjoyable game, but as everyone also agrees is important, a more enjoyable and interestingly matched contest.
I play for fun.
Because guys from 10 year of age to 15 they think it fun to beat a girl
But they get mad when they lose to one and they cheat a lot..
Guys from 15 to 25 are rule mugers the games take way to long when you play this group . and will beak out the rule books every move
25 to 35 age
is a group that is just starting to chill out and want to play.. they will have the bigger games and bigger army's and try to help you and are super nice .
They have the best looking Armys and are mostly painted..
35 and older
are the best players they will play and will let you win ..
they will talk nice to you . They will notice when you you wear a low cut top :)
But act like they didn't
they will give you hugs at the end of the game and ask when you coming back
Kera foehunter
Kera
Sounds like a very wise and fair assessment of the lot of us. Well said!
I never build tailored lists. Most of the nights i go to the club, i dont have any idea who i will be up against, so i build all comers list. The army selection is the real fun part for me cause i try to build an army with a strategy in mind; but also try to guess how they will perform vs one army or another, etc. I play many situations in my mind, do a bit of mathhammer where required but the things is, i never try to vanquish my opponent with an uber list. As Will put it above, they are my friends. We chat about what s going on in our lives while we re playing. If an uber list makes the game end on turn 3, that s less chatting time. I wouldnt want that.
Once the game started however, i play to win. I dont mean a waac kinda winning tho, just what cornixt said above: you have to perform the best in game otherwise it is not fun for your opponent either.
We have some elements in our list that can easily be called cheese, op, etc… The way i overcome this resistance in my club was introducing them to my opponents one by one and after the game, speaking about how they can deal with it. Brought the dest first, played it. Showed its weaknesses after. Next game i fielded MC along with the dest, added taurus guy, k’daai, etc all one by one. That might help you when your army list or roster is called cheese in your environs. And might increase the fun factor.
Nice topic to bring up, Bolg. This discussion is one worth having periodically to remind us all what the game should be about. After reading the whole thread I think all of us (almost) would agree that although they are not mutually exclusive, having fun (for you and your opponent) is more important than winning.
I almost always play with balanced lists that are not tailored against a specific opponent. I also write my lists thinking about trying innovative tactics to have a fun game, even though the new strategy might clearly be less powerful than the strategies I have played before. This also seems to reflect what many people have said in this discussion.
BUT recently I made a mistake that I’d like to share with you because there’s something to learn from it. I think I wrote about it somewhere in CDO but I think it’s relevant here. A friend challenged me and told me he wanted to try an overpowered High Elves list (he described it as such) that he had tailored against Dwarfs. He asked me to bring Dwarfs and suggested it would be fair if I tailored it against HEs. I believe this would have been fun because both of us would have been in the same wavelength. However, the day I brought my Dwarfs to play against him he didn’t show up and I played against other people with the horrible list that I had available. The result was NOT fun. So I learned that if I ever agree to this kind of challenge again, I should always take an alternative balanced list.
As a reasonably experienced player, I think the major point here is judging what your opponent is like. When I play vs my regular opponents, we play pretty hard lists as that what we all enjoy. But if I play someone new or someone who I can tell is not a competitive player, I’m not going to bring a tournament list - what’s the point? I’ll end up killing them horribly and ruining their evening, and I won’t even learn anything from it. If you’re good at the game, I think in some ways you have almost a responsibility to make sure the game is fun for both sides.
In the same way, my tournament lists are (I think) still fun to play against. It loses me games regularly too - at the Maul 3 weeks ago, I got 3 big wins out of my first 3 (all enjoyable) games and found myself on table 1 against a Daemon army that I knew it was physically impossible for my VCs to beat (barring dumbass moves on my opponent’s part). But that’s fine - if I had taken that Daemon army I wouldn’t have been able to look my opponents in the eye - its the equivalent of turning up to a gunfight with a rocket launcher. As it turned out, I denied him the massacre he thought he would get and it was actually worth the game just to see what I could do in that situation. I still lost but it was pretty much the only game I learned anything in.
Its worth mentioning the 5k VP system at the Maul is also an excellent system that encourages good games imo - it rewards VPs scored, not wins. This meant the lame skink skirmish clouds and 90 shot WE lists that are designed to win by a small margin were nowhere near the top ten, while even players who had lost a bunch of games still finished high if they took fun armies that got stuck in.
Yeah, what Baggronor said. I’ve never played in a competitive environment and can’t see myself ever intending to - for me, Warhammer is a craft hobby and the main criteria for determining my success at it is finishing a project to my satisfaction. Even if I played games regularly, I’d still spend the vast majority of my hobby time building and painting models (because nothing goes in the display cabinet and hence to the table until it’s finished!) not rolling dice around. I don’t list build, I don’t proxy and I don’t collect based on what will win games. What I’m getting at is that it would be very silly for be to care who “wins” the occasional games of “push the toy soldiers around the table and roll dice to see which ones get put away first”.
But, if other people derive enjoyment from tournament-style gaming then that’s fine. Whatever lifts your luggage. The key thing, as Baggronor says, is making sure you and your opponent(s) are on the same page. Tournaments are good for getting a lot of like-minded people together and ensuring no hurt feelings.
Although, to be honest, if I turned up with one of my “armies” (read: collections of models with the same colour-scheme) and an opponent had some uber netlist, it wouldn’t bother me if they trashed me. I’m afraid I cannot conceive of the mind that gets angry or upset about losing a game of Warhammer.
Of course, while playing, you are trying to beat your rival by your tactic and cleverness… but it is a game and the main objective is to have a fun time, and be comfortable with your army, not playing with an army list designed for beating but which is totally boring and absurd.
Well Thommy that is true, But it not the winning that fun. Its sitting back and waiting to see who going to blunder then siege the moment … Like a cat going after a bird, they have a smile on there face as they pounce
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying - the object is to win, in the same way that the object of reading a book is looking at each page and comprehending the sentences written there until you reach the last page - but that’s not why you do it. That would be the fun thing, whatever that means to both or all participants.
